Desktop Intelligence and the Report Conversion Tool

or, The End of the World as We Know It (Part 2)

In Desktop Intelligence, it’s possible to display “yesterday” on a report using the following formula:

CurrentDate()-1

The Report Conversion Tool will convert the formula; however, Web Intelligence will not understand it, displaying the following error:

#DATATYPE

The formula can usually be corrected in either the converted Web Intelligence document or the original Desktop Intelligence document.  However, today I encountered the formula in the document header and was unable to modify the Web Intelligence cell (in Web Intelligence XI R2 – sigh – not sure if 3.x handles this item better).  So I corrected it first in Desktop Intelligence and re-ran the Report Conversion Tool.  The corrected formula should be:

RelativeDate(CurrentDate(), -1)

On a related note, I frequently find CurrentDate() displayed on a scheduled report to indicate when the report was generated.  Both CurrentDate() and LastExecutionDate() return the same date/time at the time of scheduling.  So either one can be used to schedule and distribute an Adobe PDF, for example.  However, if a user views the document instance in the InfoView portal, the CurrentDate() no longer reflects when the data was generated.  Therefore, it is recommended to always use LastExecutionDate() to display the age of the data, because it will always be correct.

In my next post, I’ll look at migration strategies Desktop Intelligence documents that use Free Hand SQL and “do not regenerate SQL” (see related article, Retiring Desktop Intelligence Free-Hand SQL) as we consider a world without Desktop Intelligence.